Yumejoshi

Yumejoshi are female fans who enjoy imagining a relationship between a character from an anime, manga, or game and themselves or a stand-in for themselves. The creative genre that turns this kind of imagining into fiction and illustration is yume, and the people who partake in it are called yumejoshi. The object of affection is usually a 2D character, though it can also be a real person, like an idol or a voice actor.

The relationship is not only romantic. It covers friendship, bonds closer to family, and even a purely distant one, in which the fan never becomes directly involved and only watches over the character. Ways of entering the story vary just as widely: some fans identify with the protagonist directly, while others write them as a separate, independent character.

At the center of the fan work is the yumenushi. This is the protagonist who appears in the story as a stand-in for the reader or the writer, most often an original character with no name. Through the yumenushi, the fan vicariously experiences time spent with a character on the other side of the screen. The word yume (dream) carries two senses at once: picturing a relationship that could not happen in reality, and stepping into the world of a story.

In social media posts and in conversation, fans sometimes call themselves yume-onna, half in jest and at their own expense. The same written form can also be read yumejo.

Yumejoshi culture has its roots in a form of writing called yume shōsetsu, dream novels. The reader types in their own name, and the protagonist's name is replaced with it on screen. This name conversion mechanism is the defining feature of the form: every reader can read the same story with themselves as the protagonist.

Novels of this kind spread across personal websites from the late 1990s to around 2000. The prototype is generally held to be a short piece with a name conversion function, posted on a doujin fiction site of the period.

Dedicated conversion tools circulated, and their use on fan sites for popular series spread the format quickly. No clear record remains, however, of exactly when the form began or where the name yume shōsetsu came from.

How the Word Yumejoshi Spread

Where works get posted has shifted over the years, starting with personal websites and novel sites built for mobile phones, then moving to posting services such as Uranai Tsukūru, Hameln, and pixiv. From the late 2000s onward, once venues like these had spread, writers and readers began calling themselves yumejoshi and sharing works and tastes on social media.

More recently, in 2020, pixiv added a feature that lets readers change the protagonist's name as they read.

How Yumejoshi Differ from Fujoshi

Another word for female otaku is fujoshi. Fujoshi enjoy romance between male characters, known as BL, and as a rule they watch that relationship from the outside.

Yumejoshi, by contrast, put the character's relationship with themselves or with their yumenushi as the focus.

The big difference between the two comes down to whether the point of view starts from your own side. That said, plenty of people enjoy both, or switch between them depending on the work, so the line isn't as clean as all that.

Jirai and Sumiwake

A word you'll run into frequently in yumejoshi communities is jirai, literally "landmine." It refers to anything that upsets you when you “step on it”, a setup or plot development you don't want to see. The classic example is your favorite character being written into a romance with someone other than you, and it isn't only other fans' works that can do it. Official canon can be a landmine too.

What counts as jirai differs from person to person. When posting a work, writers therefore use tags to show which way its content leans, or attach a short warning. In yumejoshi communities, this consideration for sumiwake, keeping separate tastes in separate places, is especially important.

Yumenushi, Yumedanshi, and the Word Joshi

Many words have branched off from yume. The stand-in placed in the story is the yumenushi. An illustration showing a character together with a yumenushi is called a yume-e, and the comic version a yume manga. There is also yumedanshi, the male counterpart to yumejoshi, though they are few in number and rarely call themselves by that name.

The joshi in the name means "girls," but liking yume has nothing to do with gender. Writers and readers who are men, or who have said nothing about their gender, are yume fans no less than anyone else.

Yume and Reader-Insert

English-speaking fandom enjoys characters in a very similar way. In reader-insert fan fiction, the reader becomes the protagonist, addressed as "you," in a story with characters from the original work. The reader's name is written as Y/N, short for "Your Name," and each reader mentally substitutes their own name.

The idea is very close to the name conversion used in yume shōsetsu. On AO3, Wattpad, and Tumblr, huge numbers of works are shared under tags in the form "Character x Reader." There is also self-insert, a form in which the author writes themselves as the protagonist, and it overlaps neatly with the way a yumenushi is set up.